Did you get paid during Hurricane Sandy?

If your place of employment was shut down because of Hurricane Sandy, did your employee pay you for the days off? Or did they not pay you?

I asked this question on my Facebook page. Some people answered, some people told me to stay away from the topic, as it’s “toxic.”

Well, I’m splitting the difference. I’m writing about it. Leaving out names, for the most part.

It all started when an Amtrak employee contacted me. He wasn’t getting paid for last Monday and Tuesday. Basically, he told me the union guys were not getting paid for the days they weren’t out on the tracks. But non-union (read: management) was getting paid. The employee wasn’t all that upset about not getting paid, but found it distressing management was.

“All maintenance of way personnel must be in the union,” the employee told me. “Basically the people who work out on the tracks, or on the trains, or in the stations, etc. will not be paid, but the management will be. Lovely, no?”

I saw email sent by Amtrak to their employees, and it checked out. “We are grateful for the feedback we received on the Special Employee Advisory — Hurricane Sandy Update #5 which discussed the corporate inclement weather policy for those non-agreement employees who did not report to work last Monday and Tuesday,” the email read. “Non-agreement employees will be paid for October 29 and October 30.”

I spoke with Steve Kulm, a spokesperson for Amtrak, who told me these employees were allowed to use personal or vacation time for these days they didn’t work.

“Those employees at Amtrak are under contract, a negotiated contract, and those agreements cover employee pay issues,” Kulm said. “Those agreements also talk about forced reduction of positions due to emergencies.”

From here, I went to Facebook, asking people what happened to them when it came to work and Sandy. There’s no easy answers here, no tried and true “right” thing to do.

But the “wrong” thing to do came through again.

A Dayton company, according to an employee, is making workers use the same personal or vacation time. Not a terrible thing, in theory. Except, again, management doesn’t have to burn their own days. They get paid for the full 40 hours.

You ask me, this is wrong. The policies at the Dayton company, and at Amtrak, are terrible. All for one, one for all, are not, apparently, the way things go at these places. The hurricane was a (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime circumstance, and to force your workers to give up their own time due to the natural disaster seems — at best — unfair.

Now listen — I understand if you’re a small company, or a small store, and you had to close because of the storm. It’s tough to pay your employees when no money is coming in to pay them. That’s understandable, and it’s why there are ways put in place by the government to help recoup lost paydays. (Some places to start the process seem to be disasterassistance.gov or your state’s unemployment office, although again, based on Facebook feedback, getting unemployment benefits for forced days off seems like it’s going to take a lot of hoop-jumping.)

But this “some get paid, some don’t” nonsense? It stinks.

I would like to point out here some companies went all in. One reader told me the Ford dealership her son works for paid them for the full week even though they were closed, and Tom Cheatle — full disclosure, I knew the guy back from college — wrote in to tell me his company, Roberts Technology Group, Inc. Chalfont, Pa., was closed for two days because of the storm and paid their employees as if they were open.

“We only have 23 employees but paying for two missed days each goes much further than ‘screwing’ employees out of pay due to Mother Nature,” Cheatle, who is the VP/GM of the company, said. “It was not the employees fault that the company was shut down.”

No easy answers here. That much is clear. And yeah, there’s bigger problems than a day or two of missed pay.

But I bet there’s a lot of people out there who, as a result of how their employer handled the Sandy disaster, are either happy and dazzled and willing to go the extra mile for their employers, or who will now be sure to punch in at 9, punch out at 5, and cash in each and every minute of vacation, personal and sick time for a long time to come.